Text Rendering in Skins2 Mode

[spark]

Hi,

I've been looking at writing a basic skin for VLC but I've noticed that the font in the playlist (and elsewhere, like the song title) is not rendered very well -- it seems squashed as if it's got negative kerning and it seems to have too much anti-aliasing.

The font i'm using is Tahoma, but it seems to be the same with all fonts.

Screenshot:



Can I fix this in my skin? Or if it is a problem with VLC itself, can it be fixed there? Any help would be much appriciated.

[Sigmund]

I guess it is a problem in the skins code. Don't know if you can expect a fix for it any time soon.

[spark]

Ok, thanks for your response anyway.

[AsMaX]

Hi,
if you zoom on your screenshot, you will notice that Word does no antialiasing at all, so VLC is better
Indeed the kerning seems wrong, but skins2 relies on libfreetype2 to render the text, so either I don't use it correctly (I don't see where...), or there is a bug in libfreetype, at least on windows (I never saw things like that on linux, or maybe there is only a problem with the Windows system fonts)

[Sigmund]

asmax: the problem indeed only happen on windows. I've had a bit of a look at it, but I can't reproduce it on my linux. But several other have reproduced it on windows. (and several others have failed to reproduce it on linux)

[spark]

Hi,
if you zoom on your screenshot, you will notice that Word does no antialiasing at all, so VLC is better
Indeed the kerning seems wrong, but skins2 relies on libfreetype2 to render the text, so either I don't use it correctly (I don't see where...), or there is a bug in libfreetype, at least on windows (I never saw things like that on linux, or maybe there is only a problem with the Windows system fonts)

Hi AsMaX, thanks for your reply. I've done a screenshot below of how the same text renders in GIMPs freetype plugin on Windows:



...so it seems that freetype itself works ok on Windows. Interestingly, if you turn "hinting" off in the GIMP plugin, the text becomes more squashed (although still not as bad as VLC). Perhaps hinting is turned off in VLC at the moment, and we could try turning it on to see if it makes a difference?